


My Heroes Have Always Been Demons

by phantisma



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-07
Updated: 2006-06-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 04:01:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantisma/pseuds/phantisma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In my world, Wesley doesn't die, and he and Angel talk about the things Angel thought about before signing away his rights to the Shanshu prophecy to prove to the Black Thorn that he was bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Heroes Have Always Been Demons

“You did what?” Wesley asked, his voice filled with incredulous frustration.

Beside him, Angel shrugged, turning away from the window, away from the broken and quiet body inside. Wesley himself wasn’t entirely whole, still wrapped in a hospital gown that hid the wound in his belly to everyone but Angel. Angel could smell it. “It wasn’t that big a deal, Wes.”

“Not a big deal?” Wesley too turned away from the window to look at him. “How can you say that?”

Angel could feel the hurt, the anguish rolling off of Wesley. For five years, Wesley had walked with him down a very rough, very rocky road. They had all believed that redemption lay at the end of it, even Angel. He knew better now.

Of course, hindsight is usually sharper than anything other than a vision, and having the advantage now of both, he was far wiser than his many dull moments over the years might add up to. He sighed and crossed his arms, noting the decided lack of heart beating in his chest. “I saw it all, a gift from Cordy.”

He’d seen it, felt it and denied it for two days. But in the end, the vision had given him a direction, a path. Redemption was on the table, but not for him.

“You saw what, Angel? The chance to throw away everything we’ve worked for?”

Angel shook his head. “No, I’m still who I am, Wesley, still fighting the fight. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Angel.” Wesley said, sinking into a chair to the side of the window into the ICU room.

Angel paced in front of him. “I’m not…by myself, I’m nothing. It has always been us…You, Doyle, Cordy, Buffy…always me with someone else. You never knew me as a mortal, Wesley. I wasn’t worth much. I may have hated my father, but he was right about that much. I was a womanizing, lazy drunk. I was never anyone’s Champion.”

“You were young, and –“

“Let me finish.” Angel walked away, toward the nurse’s station and then back. “Then, I was Angelus, and we both know what a bastard I was then.” Wesley nodded, settling back in the chair uncomfortably and rubbing at his temples.

“I never asked for this soul. I wouldn’t have wanted it, even if I thought it possible. I rather liked being powerful and cruel. No, don’t interrupt. I had a taste for it before Darla turned me. It’s fair to say that had I lived I would have been as much a sadist as I became after.”

“Angel, the fact that you are who you are today is testament to the fact that you would have eventually found your way.”

“Is it?” Angel stopped pacing. “I still like pain, Wesley. Giving it, receiving it…there’s a part of me that is aroused by it. There always will be.” He looked at his feet for a long moment. “That’s part of the point. I’m not Angelus and I’m not Liam. Hell, I’m not sure who I am exactly, but I changed when they put this soul inside me. Angelus is here, and Liam is here…and so am I.” He pointed to his chest for emphasis.

Angel had thought about this, but never spoken about it, never said the words out loud. It wouldn’t have been fair. There was so much pain, so much death and dying and gut wrenching awful pain and his own little morality crisis wasn’t going to help any of it.

So he had done what he did whenever the emotion became too much. He swallowed it, made his decision and kept it to himself. And now, here they sat, and he needed to say it. “I realized something that night, after the vision, before I set it all in motion.” He came to sit beside Wesley, stretching out his legs and resting his head against the wall behind him. “It wasn’t about me at all. None of it had ever been about me.”

He closed his eyes, remembering those long, laborious hours after the vision, the nightmare. He couldn’t sleep and he wasn’t ready to wake them all. Instead he’d sat and relived memories the way he had in the early days of the soul…the ache and agony of each death, each moment of cruelty, each and every step toward redemption.

Wesley licked his lips and looked at him. It seemed a lifetime ago that they had first met, and the last five years stretched out behind them like some headlong rush into the abyss that stopped three feet shy of the edge. “You decided it was about him instead?”

Angel shrugged tiredly. “Seemed plausible. Funny really, when you think about it. Here I am, all souled and broody, straining against the tide of evil in search of redemption…and he never wanted it…redemption I mean. Never asked for it.”

Wesley chuckled silently, nodding. “Most unrepentant.”

“No, that’s where we were both wrong.” Angel stood up again, moving to the window to look inside. “Look at him Wes.” Angel’s hand rose to the window, stroking lightly along it. “I locked my demon up inside me, behind the soul. I ignored him, denied him. He never did. He embraced him, fought him, overpowered him. He fought and he won.”

Wesley came to stand beside him, looking in with him. “I always thought of him as the weak one, Dru—she had a thing for the starry-eyed artist types. But he was never weak.”

“He was evil.” Wesley said. “Killed two slayers, countless hundreds of thousands.”

“The demon did, the demon was.” Angel agreed, nodding. “And, maybe, just maybe he might never have done it if it hadn’t been for that chip in his head. But look at him and tell me you can’t see it.”

Wesley glanced aside, then back into the room. He was asleep, his face slack, the dark circles under his eyes a stark counterpoint to the pallor of his skin. All around him instruments kept track of his condition, while an IV pumped fluids into him.

“He has his soul because he fought for it. He is who is because he has chosen to be that way. The demon made the choice just as much as the man did. That makes him a much better man…or demon, than I have ever been.”

There was passion in the words, the admiration of something he knew he would never attain. 

“You admire that, I understand that.”

Angel shook his head. “I don’t know if you can, really. When I did, I knew what had to be done. I’d been fighting it, knowing they would ask, looking for a way around it.”

“So you just signed it away.”

Angel nodded. “Yep.”

“Your one chance at becoming human again?”

“It wasn’t mine to begin with, Wes.” Angel said.

In the window, he moved, his eyes opening, sliding around the room until they came to the two of them standing there. Angel turned away, wiping at the tears that had gathered unexpectedly in his eyes.

“Angel.” His voice was husky, low, still laced with both pain and the painkillers that had given him a chance to sleep.

Angel inhaled sharply, though it was more an exercise in gathering himself than for any real need of air. “You ever tell him any of this, I will completely kick your ass,” he said aside to Wesley before he moved into the room. “Spike, glad to see you alive.”

“Alive.” The blond shook his head, his hand moving over his heart.

Angel smiled and perched on the bed as Wesley moved into the room. Spike blinked a greeting, his chin lifting just a little and Wesley responded with the raise of a hand. “Who else?” Spike asked and Angel’s smile faded.

He shook his head and tried to bury the ache. “No one.” Not even Connor, though Connor had managed to save Wesley first. “Well, we don’t think Illyria’s dead, but we don’t know what happened to her.”

Spike nodded, reaching for Angel’s cool hand. Angel didn’t move to shake it off, but wouldn’t look up either. “So, no Shanshu for you then?”

Angel shook his head. “Guess not.”

“Good on ya.” Spike swallowed and made a face. “This bloody hurts.” He made a gesture that could have indicated the heart or the wound in his shoulder, or any of a half a dozen other wounds. “Forgot.”

The machine next to the bed clicked on and the next dose of morphine started dripping into the IV. Spike’s blue eyes closed and he drifted into sleep. Angel nodded, then looked up at Wesley. He was pale and looked tired. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

“I shant argue with that.” Wesley let Angel put an arm around him so that he could lean on Angel as necessary. Together they ambled silently down the hall to the elevator and down to the room Wesley shared with a teenager who’d been hit by a car. Angel settled Wesley into bed, smoothing blankets up over him before kissing his forehead. “For what it’s worth, Angel, you aren’t nothing. You’re a Champion, a hero.” Angel shook his head in an attempt to shake off the accolade. Wesley caught his hand and squeezed it. “Perhaps the Shanshu prophecy was meant for Spike all along, but that doesn’t make him a better man, Angel.”

Angel tried to smile, but felt it weighed down in his grief over the many loses, the pain. His eyes were threatening tears again as Wesley used his tentative hold on Angel’s hand to draw him closer. “He may be human, Angel, but you are still my hero, you always will be.”


End file.
